All posts in On writing

It was a picture in my mind that wouldn’t let me be…

Her features were unclear, and her shape was vague, but still, I kept seeing her. The girl. She was young, teetering on the brink of puberty, unprepared for the strangeness and power of her own upcoming adolescence, and utterly alone in an isolated garden. I kept being drawn to the image of this person, who seemed to have taken up residence in my head, and slowly, around her, questions began to form.

Books have been around for ages. Pretty much as far back as people have been communicating with one another. Even before the printing press was invented, humans have found a way to share their thoughts by scratching on stone or painting on papyrus. Considering this, and the fact that there are so many of them, we often forget just how astonishing books actually are. They’re powerful in a way that is entirely unique. Continue Reading

Maybe I’m too fussy (fastidious, some might say), or perhaps I just like making life difficult for myself, but I’m one of those people who are incredibly affected by the way my surroundings look and feel…

Setting the scene for Bone Meal for Roses

Winter vinyards . The Breede Valley . Western Cape . South Africa

I’d been longing to write a book set in the Breede Valley. There’s a unique magic in the way the arid Karroo exists alongside immaculate vineyards and fruit orchards that makes it the perfect setting for a story about a half-wild child who grows up to become both strange and powerful.

When writing a guest blog article for Head of Zeus to co-incide with the UK launch of Bone Meal for Roses, I had to begin with this disclaimer: I have been known to abuse innocent metaphors.

In some cases, I’ve been guilty of drawing them out and hammering them so thin that they dissipate in disgust. That being said, the opportunity to liken the launch of my new novel (which, even in its title, Bone Meal for Roses, includes a reference to growing things), to the opening of the first, spring sweet-pea bloom in the flowerbed outside the window where I write, is just too darn tempting to pass up…

Fiction-lovers are peculiar creatures. Whilst going about our daily lives, like anyone else, we’ll do pretty much anything to avoid death. We don’t want to think about it happening to anyone we know, and we don’t want to imagine it happening to us. However, the moment we get some downtime and pick up a novel or switch on our favourite TV series, we crave it, relish it, almost demand it. When we sink in to our preferred kind of fictional escape, we expect (and possibly, deep down, want) someone to die…Continue Reading

Let me set the scene: the bathroom features chewing-gum pink 1970s wall tiles and a big old bathtub. Inside this, sits a diminutive, fluffy-haired toddler wearing nothing but a smear of bubbles on her chin and a determined expression. Bath time is over, there’s nothing left to clean and the water is getting cold, but the little girl wants none of it. Being in the water with the ducky and the sloppy-slappy washcloth is the BEST THING EVER. Her exhausted parents have learned that the only way to extract this small person from the bath is to say: “once upon a time…” and then pause. In her eagerness to hear the rest of the story, the child rises out from the water like an avenging sea monster, and is out of the bath, into her towel and pulling on her pjs before they can blink…